The time of year has come again for the Barclaycard Mercury Prize to reveal its shortlist of nominees for best British album of the year. Of the 12 albums, one winner will be chosen next month and awarded the £20,000 prize and some major bragging rights. And the nominees are…

Rudimental – Home

Foals – Holy Fire

Jon Hopkins – Immunity

Jake Bugg – Jake Bugg

Laura Mvula – Sing To The Moon

Villagers – Awayland

Savages – Silence Yourself

David Bowie – The Next Day

Disclosure – Settle

Laura Marling – Once I Was An Eagle

James Blake – Overgrown

Arctic Monkeys – AM

The winner will be announced 10/30. Previous winners include Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Pulp’s Different Class, Portishead’s Dummy, and not Radiohead, not even once.

Disclosure has to be the frontrunner…that album, and specifically the singles, has been THE sound of 2013. At least the representative sound of British music across the world…I’ve heard young people in Iceland+Scandinavian nations are obsessed with it.

Some OK albums there, although the Disclosure and Savages albums did nothing for me, and the inclusion of AM is highly dubious, given that it’s only been out for five minutes. But where the hell are the These New Puritans and British Sea Power albums? They knock all of the nominees into a cocked hat without even breaking a sweat! Ho hum…

Most Viewed

The Doors are part of a very specific category of classic-rock artists: the gateway artists. The bands that — assuming you weren’t around in the ’60s — are amongst the first names you explore when you start digging into pop music’s past. Though keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore were all… More »

Last night, U2 played the seventh night of an eight-night stand at Madison Square Garden. (Our own young classic rocker Ryan Leas reviewed one of those shows earlier in the week.) And at last night’s show, the band introduced a few special local guests. There was New York royalty Paul Simon, who came out to… More »

After reportedly showing up half an hour late, rapper Travi$ Scott got his Lollapalooza set shut down after only 5 minutes by encouraging fans to jump the security barrier and rush the stage. Festival organizers deemed the resulting chaos to be unsafe and shut the whole thing down, with security forcibly removing Scott from the… More »

Morrissey often uses his True To You website to write about cases of what he considers to be societal injustice, as he did in the recent post blasting the killer of Cecil the lion. But as Pitchfork points out, Morrissey’s latest post for the site details a much more personal violation. Morrissey writes that, a… More »

Eminem is a pretty fit dude — for a while, he was even attached to star in Antoine Fuqua’s new boxing movie Southpaw. So how does Eminem stay a pretty fit dude? By working out compulsively. And in a new article on Men’s Journal, the rapper details his compulsive exercise regimen. “In the early days,”… More »

Lollapalooza takes place this weekend in Chicago, and most of the sets from the festival will be livestreaming via Red Bull TV in case you can’t (or don’t want to) leave the comfort of your own home. Some of the acts performing this weekend include Paul McCartney (with a highlights-only set streaming), Metallica, the Weeknd,… More »

Superproducer Mark Ronson stopped by for a live in-studio session at Australian radio station Triple J today. As usual, he assembled a crack team of musicians to back him up, including Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Kirin J. Callinan on guitar. The band performed a great psyched-out cover of Queens Of The Stone Age’s “I… More »

Drake has already released not one but two diss tracks in response to Meek Mill’s ghostwriting allegations. After Funkmaster Flex promised a Meek response track Monday night on Hot 97 and failed to deliver, people were pissed, and everyone began to wonder if this mega-beef were already over. But no — the soap opera continues! More »